I keep forgetting that the approach I have brought to this course ruffles feathers for those who are expecting the standard read X papers/book chapters and write Y thousand words. All academic work involves good scholarly writing at some point but there is an awful lot of other work that goes into being able to write formal pieces.

It takes time but I think the penny has dropped for some. Sue shared how she annotates readings with the group as well as her thoughts on the paper.

So much of teaching is about design and yet we don't make a lot of use of ideas from that large field to think about what it means to teach. For me, I think of my role in this course as a kind of coach, gently trying to nudge folk to acquire useful habits and improve some of the ways they do things. In many respects the work is a bit like that described by Ranciere in his marvellous book1, The Ignorant Schoolmaster.

Footnotes

1. Rancière, J. (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation: Stanford University Press. There are copies floating about online.